Buffett: Berkshire Hathaway CEO Blasts 'Sharecropper's Society'

Is the Oracle of Omaha losing his touch? Billionaire investor
Warren
Buffett
Warren Buffett
apologized to
Berkshire Hathaway
investors for a dud deal year. "My hope was to make several multibillion-dollar acquisitions that would add new and significant streams of earnings to the many we already have," he wrote in his much-anticipated annual letter to shareholders. "But I have struck out." Buffett promised to act quickly on good investments in the $5 billion to $20 billion ballpark, but Jeremiahs are already predicting a gloomy 2005 for Buffet and Berkshire's vice chairman,
Charlie
Munger
Charlie Munger
. "He won't find anything this year," said Steve Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "Since he likes to buy things cheap, it's harder to find." Of course we all should have Buffett's batting average: Even without deal making, Berkshire Hathaway's net worth rose $8.3 billion in 2004. And tossing the Berkshire Hathaway hair shirt aside, Buffett blasted the U.S. for its continued trade deficit. "A country that is now aspiring to an 'Ownership Society' will not find happiness in--and I'll use hyperbole here for emphasis--a 'Sharecropper's Society,'" Buffett wrote, "But that's precisely where our trade policies, supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, are taking us."